Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the flowers gone?
The girls have picked them every one.
Oh, When will you ever learn?
Oh, When will you ever learn?
Pete Seeger (1955)
Were you uncertain about climate change and the need for a drastic global response?
On Wednesday night, September 1, New York City had a once-in-a-century weather event. Over three inches of rain poured down on Central Park in an hour between 8:51 and 9:51 p.m. The downpour, a remnant of Hurricane Ida, broke the previous once-in-a-century rainfall record that was established a week earlier by Hurricane Henri. Ida flooded streets, subways, and ground floor apartments and killed more than three dozen people in Northeastern state. Flooding by the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in Philadelphia reached their highest levels in at least 100 years. Torrential rain this summer in Europe is considered a once in 400-year event. Some locations in China recorded over 20 inches of rain in two days.
As Hurricane Ida passed through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico it rapidly increased in ferocity from a tropical storm near the Cayman Islands, a Category 1 hurricane off of Cuba, to a Category 3 storm in the Gulf, and a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 130 m.p.h. as it reached the Louisiana coast. According to Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, it was “one of the strongest hurricanes to hit anywhere in Louisiana since at least the 1850s.”
A warming world and the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico made Ida stronger, packing higher winds and more water. As weather.com meteorologist Kait Parker described conditions, "This hot water is like throwing fuel on the fire. It helps a hurricane like Ida grow stronger faster, and produces more rain."
The same week, the Ida devastated the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, Hurricane Nora caused floods and landslides along Mexico’s Pacific coast. Pacific storms were so powerful that the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (DHSEM) warned New Mexicans severe weather in western and central portions of the state. Pacific storm systems now arrive earlier and are more frequent. This year, on May 2, Tropical Storm Andres became the earliest named storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Heatwaves accompanying climate change are striking all over the planet. June and July 2021 set temperature records for the “contiguous” United States. The average temperature in June was 4.2°F above the 20th-century average, making it the warmest year since the National Weather Service started to keep records in 1894. In July, twenty-two American cities set new records for all-time hottest month in history. Eleven states, including New York, had top-ten wettest Julys. On July 9, the temperature at Death Valley National Park's Furnace Creek Visitor Center was 130 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a new world record for hottest reliably measured temperature. If extreme weather was an Olympic event this year, the United States would have won many additional gold medals.
Climate change is a global phenomenon. In July, catastrophic floods killed hundreds of people in Europe, wildfires raged in Siberia, in the eastern Mediterranean, and the western coasts of the U.S. and Canada.
But the heat didn’t stop at the end of July. In August, the temperature in Floridia, a small town outside of Siracusa in Sicily, broke European records when it hit 124 degrees Fahrenheit. In mid-August 2021, there was a spike in glacial surface melt in Greenland and on August 14, 2021, as temperatures rose above freezing, it rained at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time in recorded history.
As a result of climate change, Madagascar, an island nation of the southeastern coast of Africa faces the world's first "climate change famine after four years without rain. The drought is devastating farming, forcing families to scavenge for insects to survive.
Areas in Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average, contributing to the crisis that brought down a U.S. backed government. According to the United Nations, one-third of all Afghans face crisis levels of food insecurity. Because of drought, the World Food Program estimates that 40% of crops are lost. Of the world’s twenty-five nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than half are suffering from civil unrest.
According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, severe heat waves that used to occur every 50 years will now happen once a decade. Another study by climate scientists determined that record-shattering temperatures are seven times more likely to occur between now and 2050 than in the pas, and more than 20 times more likely to occur after 2050.
Climate change is forcing major economic adjustments. As Hurricane Nora threatened Colorado with flash floods, marijuana growers supplying the legal recreational pot industry demanded government action to protect the industry from adverse weather events.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Pete Seeger (1967)
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1
